The Backrooms
A photo of an empty, yellow-walled room with buzzing lights became a modern legend: a world behind reality, endless rooms you can fall into and never leave.
What was reported
In 2019, an anonymous user on the message board 4chan posted a photo of an empty room with yellow wallpaper, damp carpet and fluorescent lights, asking for 'disturbing images that just feel off'. Another user replied with a story: if you 'noclip' out of reality in the wrong place, you end up in the Backrooms, an endless maze of such rooms, with a constant hum of lights.
The idea spread enormously, inspiring stories, games, videos and a film project, part of a wider fascination with eerie, empty 'liminal spaces'.
Explanations offered
In 2024, internet sleuths traced the original photo to a 2002 renovation of a former furniture shop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The Backrooms are fiction, but they show how a single unsettling image can become a modern legend.
- When
- Posted in 2019; photo traced in 2024
- Where
- Oshkosh, Wisconsin, USA
- Witnesses
- Internet users
- Status
- Internet legend
Famous cases are real, widely reported events. Each file sets out what witnesses said and the explanations that have been offered, without taking a side.
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